


Multiplicity of Lightning, The

by wildpeace



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-03-25
Updated: 2003-03-25
Packaged: 2019-05-15 07:49:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14786421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildpeace/pseuds/wildpeace
Summary: Excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo, but now he's just trying to ride the waves without landing his ass in the sugar bowl.





	Multiplicity of Lightning, The

**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

**The Multiplicity of Lightning**

**by:** Bluefairy

**Character(s):** Sam, with S/A references, and also some J/D, because I can't help myself. It's an addiction.  
**Rating:** TEENish I guess.  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine at all. No infringement intended.  
**Summary:** Excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo, but now he's just trying to ride the waves without landing his ass in the sugar bowl.  
**Author's Note:** I was told to do Sam, I did Sam. I couldn't help but keep to Season Two. I know it best, and it doesn't have any of the 'badness'.

Thanks to Rach and the Grasshopper for the support, handholding and cough medicine. Thanks to everyone else for all feedback ever.

Oh, and the Latin means: He used to raise a storm in a teapot. Incase anyone wanted to know. 

They all expected him to be the perky one.  The one they could keep going to and taking from.  They all leaned on him, but he had no one to lean on.  He wondered what would happen when he eventually toppled.  Who would they lean on then?

This was never meant to be the life he was living.  Rich married Yuppie, that’s what he was supposed to be.  Damn his best friend for bringing him the real thing, with all its challenges and problems.  Damn him for showing up with his terrible poker face in the middle of the storm and tempting him, tempting back to a life that he had meant to leave to his youthful, wayward years.  When he had stopped believing that his words could change the world.  Damn Josh for reappearing, for offering the strength of Jove with a heart of gold on a silver platter.  If he’d just take the jump, if he’d only dare to try....

He had been faced with difficult decisions.  Or namely, the most difficult, the choice between following Josh, or staying with Lisa.  Josh was his best friend.  He knew him better than anyone in the world, and he was offering him all he had ever wanted.  Lisa, on the other hand, was offering him something that Josh never could: love.  Romantic, sexual, not quite unconditional.  She had cried when he told her he had quit his high-powered, multi bonus, secure futured job.  She had wept into her pillows and refused to speak to him.  

In his new life, when days went well, Sam never thought of Lisa.  His mind was on other things, more important things: briefings and memos and people he had to meet with, to persuade.  He would be brimming with passion, with energy, with words that spilled and tumbled from him.  

It was the other days that she crept into his mind, the ones where things did not go so well, weren’t so perfect.  Some days when he was annoyed, when the words didn’t want to flow.  When he felt as though he couldn’t get up the next morning, when someone had screwed them over, or he had screwed up, let his friends down so badly that he didn’t think he’d be able to ever look them in the face again.  Those were the nights he thought of Lisa, when her face would swim in front of him, taunting him as he lay in bed, cold and very alone, and he would wonder whether things would be easier if he had stayed with her, with that life.  

Then in the next moment he’d pull himself together; pick himself up off the bed.  He’d kick off his shoes and pull off his tie.  His shirt and pants would be thrown across the room, and he’d fall back into bed, a small smile on his face: positive this time.  He’d feel better in the morning.  Things would maybe get better, maybe get worse, but they would change somehow, and eventually he would be forgiven.  Then they’d face their newest apocalypse over a last supper of pizza and beer, arguing and bantering and laughing about their latest screw up.

He and Josh would go out sometimes, after days like that, and get blindingly drunk.  They would hit some random bar, and he would make eyes at women who were far too young for him.  Josh would relax after one beer.  After two he would try and flirt with the bargirl.  After three he would get morose and start extolling painfully the virtues of one of the only women he couldn’t have.  At four beers, hers would be the only address he could remember, so Sam would bundle him in a cab, give the driver $10 and remind him to be nice to her cats.

Then, quite alone, he’d walk home.

With his hands shoved deep in his pockets, against an almost biting wind off the Chesapeake, he’d think about how he missed California at three in the morning, with its constant neon glow, and its sensual lingering heat.  When he walked a mile without passing anyone, he missed New York, which was alive 24/7, bursting with stories and happenings, with excitement.  DC may have been called the capital, the heart of the country, but it seemed to hold a quiet reverence for the sleeping that Sam, even after years of living with it, did not find wholly comforting.  

So he’d go home and he’d turn on CNN, loosen his tie and watch them dissect his day’s trials and tribulations.  He would begin to fall asleep around the evening’s repeat of ‘The Music Room’, his eyelids falling and rising like his chest.  With his eyes half closed he listened as a blonde English girl in perfect youthful naïveté discussed her feelings on the morality of musical piracy: ‘the artists shouldn’t mind if they’re really in it for the love of music’.  Down with commercialism. 

He had been like that once, he thinks.  

He’s not unhappy.  He’s happier then he’d been in a long time.  They make less Rookie mistakes; they’re finally beginning to get things done.  The ice is thawing between him and his father, and there’s a girl he could love and could love him if either or them could find the time.  More over, finally, finally, their scars are beginning to fade: body, mind and heart.

This year, these months and days and weeks had been the hardest he had ever known.  He wasn’t sure he had ever experienced real hate before, even living in LA, in New York, in these big cities with all their people.  He was sure he had never seen it so nakedly displayed. 

That night, that infamous night, he had run as fast as he could, almost tripping down the stairs, weaving through the people who still stood around, sat on the ground, frozen with fear, panicking.  Some hurt, he couldn’t tell.  People called out to him, for his help, and he felt so selfish as he grabbed the arm of the paramedic, hard enough to leave bruises, and choked words into an explanation that he later could not remember giving.

He felt selfish, but he couldn’t help it when his mind was so filled with images.  With the sight of Josh clutching bloodied hands to his chest, the smell of mayhem and sulphur, the sound of Toby’s painful, strangled cry as with his bare hands he stopped their friend’s head from smashing into the pavement.  

So he had stood, watching then as paramedics lifted Josh up, spoke to him, tried to get a response.  He made no sense for the most part, just a few odd words.  Sam thought he heard the word ‘Joanie’ come out of his friend’s mouth, but he didn’t want the think about what that meant.  Josh’s breathing had been rapid and shallow and his face contorted with pain.  He had fought the people who tried to help him, and Sam had grabbed his hands to stop him.  He had opened his eyes then, blinked with all his effort, squeezed his hand a little.  " Sam," had been all he had said, before closing his eyes again, coughing and ebbing away.  

Standing in that ambulance, seeing Toby’s fear ravaged eyes, and feeling CJ’s crimson stained hands grasp at his forearm, Sam had never more wished he could die.  He wished he had taken the bullet for his friend; he mentally beat himself for not being superhuman, for not being able to save Josh too.  

Some nights, when Sam sat in his office, staring down the blinking, mocking starkness of a page, those would be the memories that would come to him, and he would have trouble remembering why they did any of it.  

He would remember Donna’s oceanic eyes, waterlogged, and her mouth as Toby found the courage to tell her the truth, when everyone else withered into fearful silence.  When he couldn’t even raise his eyes to meet her, because his mind was filled with only one thought: he couldn’t believe he had forgotten to call her.  

Sam would remember her tears forever.  They had been one of the choice images that had reeled through his mind that morning, as multiple news anchors all asked him the same questions.  He answered as though automated, though he was sure he had spaced out at some point.  He wasn’t sure; he had never watched those tapes.  

He remembered the feel of Donna’s hand, borrowing the reserved strength that he hadn’t known he possessed, grasping tightly as they walked what were the longest few feet of his life.  He remembered holding her up, watching her fingers skim Josh’s not quite deathly pale cheek, and Josh’s face as he struggled to open his eyes, as he realized who was there.  He remembered his relief that Josh was hurting, because the alternative was that he felt nothing, and was no longer with them.  He remembers feeling terrible for having that thought.  

The nights that were the hardest, those were the memories that haunted him.  Those, and other bad times, amalgamated, telescoped, all made into one terrible vignette.  Toby’s disappointment coupled with CJ’s hurt.  Watching Josh, pale and shivering, yelling at the President, and the realization they could lose him so soon after they had just got him back.  The pain of Leo’s past becoming today’s headlines, and being utterly powerless to stop it.  The knowledge that the President had to choose between the lesser of two evils so very often, and hated himself for it.  

It was hard for Sam, because he wanted so much for the world to be a loving place, and for the people around him to be happy, to be safe and perfect.  They weren’t, of course, and never would be, except for their perfect imperfections.

They were all good people though.  They had been there for each other time and time again, pulling each other up off the asphalt and out of the fire.  Sam comforted himself by trying to live in these times.  He remembered all the way back at the beginning: to the Campaign bar stops, when everything and everyone was new, and they didn’t think they had a hope in hell of going anywhere, but for their enthusiasm.  When they were still unknown, when even the Governor didn’t know their names, let alone the rest of the country.  When no one knew what they did, when it was still their little secret society.  When they didn’t have to share the real thing with anyone.  

He would think about their friendships, about how they showed they loved each other, with out ever saying the words out loud.  He would remember CJ buying Josh pyjamas that were far too big, and Josh wearing them despite it.  He’d remember Toby forcing Josh to go to a meeting with people he hated, just so he wouldn’t get fired, and Josh going, not because he was sorry for what he had said, but because Toby had asked him to.  He’d think about Toby going to get CJ, right back at the beginning, and CJ trusting him enough to go with him.  He would remember Donna holding Josh’s hand, taking him to the emergency room on Christmas Eve, and he would remember Josh letting her.  

One late night, whe they had congregated at Josh’s apartment to watch the vote on a bill they had worked so hard for, Sam looked at the people around him and thought about the times they had been there for him, had shown him that he was important.  He looked over at Josh, sprawled bonelessly on the couch, beer bottle dangling precariously from his fingers, and a dreaming smile on his face.  He remembered all the times Josh had used humor to dispel his worry or anxiety, and his frat boy promise to ‘get him drunk and put him to bed’; to be his friend despite everything else crumbling around him.

CJ sat on the floor, copious inches of leg stretched out in front of her.  Her jacket was off and her shoes had been kicked off at some point in the evening, for comfort.  Her head was leaning against Toby’s knees, her eyes shut in long awaited peace, probably dreaming of the pressroom gloating she was going to do the next day.  CJ still searched for Sam when she was afraid.  He was still the one she associated with safety, with protection.

When Donna had turned up in Manchester, Sam had thought she was a pretty face who wouldn’t last a week.  Watching her sleep with her head on Josh’s chest, and a hand resting lightly over his heart, Sam was glad he had been wrong.  Donna had come through for him so many times when she probably should have just knocked the wind out of him, brought him down a peg or two.  As he watched her hair fall across her face, Sam could still picture with perfect clarity her compassionate, innocent stare, judgment free as she corrected ‘you meant grandfather, Sam’.  

Sam looked at Toby, always illusive, always a little distant, slumped in the armchair, one hand propping up his chin, one resting lightly on CJ’s shoulder.  Toby always said what he meant and never said what he felt.  Sam hadn’t known what to say when Toby had turned to him in the office that day, handed him back his draft of a speech and told him he was proud.  He had disappeared before Sam head regained the power of speech.  

In the weeks that followed, Sam knew something was beginning to change, for a lot of people. It was like the hours that preceded a thunderstorm, heavy with energy, electricity, hunger and anticipation.  He thought there might have been something in the water, or maybe they were all just a little punchy after one to many later than normal nights, but there was definitely a feeling of something strange in the air.  

He had tried to ask Josh about it, about the strange feeling that something wasn’t right, but Josh had been tearing through his rolodex for the number of a florist, not realizing that a yellow pages sat a foot away on his book shelf, not really realizing or seeing anything, other then the big red ring around the date on his calendar.  

CJ too had brushed him off, ruffled his hair and told him not to worry, and to get out of her way cause she had a briefing.  When sitting in his office he heard the familiar thwaping sound of a rubber ball against a wall, and surmised that it would be best not to interrupt Toby to ask anything.  

The next evening he sort of managed to forget his sense of foreboding.  Instead he watched with twisted fascination the latest unfolding chapter of the Josh and Donna saga, intermingled with unfunny jokes, chopsticks and a disbelief that any woman could really be anti ERA.  Even a Republican woman.  Who he did not find attractive at all.  

He had always been their thermometer; generally more knowledgeable about the temperature of the public on certain issues then the rest of them.  CJ blamed it on all the magazines that he read, the gossip he listened too.  He told her it was just that he, unlike Toby, cared what the public thought, unlike her, didn’t have the Press to deal with and unlike Josh, he remembered that there was a world outside the office, and life didn’t stop in 1997.  She had thrown a pen at him for that, and laughed, calling him their little meteorologist, the one that watched for storms.  She said he could spy a lightning strike a hundred miles in the distance.  She called him ‘Sparky’.  

He should have known there was something going on that night.  He should have realized what the vibe was that had been emanating from the office to the left, but he didn’t.  He thought about it briefly as he made his way down the stairs for coffee, the tingling returning, the electric energy, but he just blamed it on everything else and then forgot about it when the chatter started again and his mind was whisked away to more pressing arguments about who was wrong and who was right and would it be okay if I kissed you to make you stop talking?  

That night he hadn’t thought of Lisa, but of another blonde, as he laid thinking in his bed.  Of the way she had sashayed into his life and pissed him off so much that he couldn’t think what it would be like if she stopped.  He tried to stay thinking of her, he tried, because she was a ray of sunshine, comforting but dangerous in too high a measure.  He tried to stay on her, but every time he closed his eyes it wasn’t her he saw, it was the dark clouds closing in, the angry juxtapose of Toby as the door to the Roosevelt Room closed behind him, and he sat, trying to laugh, trying to find the funny with the rest of them. 

With fear in his eyes. 

So Sam had walked on eggshells for a few days, behaving like the good little boy, wishing that whatever was wrong would go away and wouldn’t come get them if only he was good enough, if he behaved himself.  And it seemed to halt, the feeling didn’t seem to spread, and he thought maybe they had averted crisis this time, maybe this time it would be okay.

It had been almost a year since they had had to piece their lives back together once, and he didn’t want to have to do it again.  He didn’t want there to be tears and screaming and near misses.  He thought maybe this year if he worked up the nerve he would go out to dinner with a certain friend, and let her try and convince him that she was right about other things.  He thought maybe that could be fun.  Nothing bad could happen at a dinner.

They were doing okay now, they had worked hard this year and had pulled themselves up by the shoelaces and managed to not fall apart, to not let each other fall at the way side.  And if they had gotten through this year together, then there was nothing they couldn’t face.  But it was all going to be okay now, this year couldn’t be any worse then the last one.  There was nothing anyone could say that would come so far as to level those words.  Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place.

At Leo’s appearance, he looks up, stops talking to Toby.  Leo’s face looks resigned, and Sam wonders whether it’s guilt that he can see in the older man’s eyes.  "Sam, come see the President with me," he requests cocking his head towards the hall.

He nods, slightly confused, and begins to leave when a voice stops him.  Toby takes a breath, a pause, before looking him in the eye.  Thunder begins to sound in his ears.

"I’ll be in my office, when you’re done."

Lightning strikes.  

THE END


End file.
